A Glance Into the Symbolic Landscapes of Tarzan By John David Ebert Descent If Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his earlier protagonist John Carter, Warlord of Mars, had in 1912 established the pattern of the superhero who arrives on the ground from the heavens above, then with his second creation — Tarzan, Lord of the Apes […]
Archives for 2008
On James Bond
The Strangely Distorted, and Weirdly Elongated World of James Bond (Unabridged Version) By John David Ebert 1. The first James Bond novel, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, appeared in 1953, just as the Korean War was coming to an end and the C.I.A. was planning the removal of Mossadegh from office in Iran. Within a few years, […]
On Babylon A.D.
Babylon A.D.: A Movie Review  By John Lobell While 2001: A Space Odyssey can be regarded as the origin of the modern visionary movie, The Matrix is the origin of the contemporary “luminous transcendent” movie. It is a genre that freaks out the critics, with its deaths and resurrections, virgin births, and suggestions that human beings are […]
On The X Files
 The X-Files and the Breakdown of Our Cultural Immune System By John David Ebert 1. By now, Mulder and Scully have become almost as famous as their literary prototypes Holmes and Watson. Indeed, in many ways, they strongly resemble this earlier pair of detectives who stand at the threshold of the birth of the forensic […]
On Wanted
Wanted: A Movie Review By John Lobell Myths are a repository of the structures and mores of a culture, a suprapsychology, a system of principles describing the nature and workings of being, the universe, society, and individual development. Movies have become a dominant artistic form in our culture, and are therefore a major vehicle for […]
William Irwin Thompson Comments
A Response to John Ebert’s Review of Cloverfield By William Irwin Thompson As always, John, an interesting spin on the ordinary. Yes, catastrophes are coming our way, which is why I feature them so strongly in my essay on “Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature.” But another point is that our culture […]
On James Bond
The Tribal Cosmology of James Bond By John David Ebert The first James Bond novel, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, appeared in 1953, just as the Korean War was coming to an end and the C.I.A. was planning the removal of Mossadegh from office in Iran. Within a few years, the U.S. government would begin sending […]
On Andy Warhol
 Andy Warhol: Prophet of You Tube By John David Ebert 1. Andy Warhol was the first great icon painter of electronic society. In contemplating his gallery of celebrity portraits, we are struck by the possibility that some Medieval icon painter, an Andre Rublev, say, had died and been reborn in the twentieth century as a […]
On Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes: Prototype For the Global Citizen By John David Ebert 1. Howard Hughes was the prototype for a new kind of human being: nomadic, uprooted, cityless, wandering, Hughes prefigured the coming inhabitant of our global aeropolis, the transurban world of “no-place” that has come to displace the traditional container of the geographically bounded cities […]
On The Maltese Falcon
The Maltese Falcon: An Archaeology of Ancient Images By John David Ebert 1. Every noir narrative begins with a corpse, and in the present case, we are confronted with the dead body of one “Miles Archer,” a man whom, we soon discover, was the partner of Sam Spade. Together, the pair ran a private detective agency […]
On the Kennedy Assassination
The War Between Eye and Ear in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy By John David Ebert If one considers the possibility that it was indeed the CIA — or certain elements within the CIA — who decided to assassinate Kennedy, one is struck by the suspicion that the act itself was an indirect condemnation […]
On Ronald Reagan
Etheric Ghosts and Virtual Doubles: John Hinckley’s Attempt on the Life of Ronald Reagan Considered From the Viewpoint of Media Studies By John David Ebert The whole drama of Reagan, John Hinckley, Jr., and Jodie Foster is symptomatic of a culture in which history is being replaced by virtual images manufactured in silicon circuits and […]
On Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley’s Televisual Clone By John David Ebert The crucial year in the generation of Elvis Presley’s first electric clone was 1956, the year in which his agent Colonel Tom Parker helped him make the switch from the tiny independent Sun label to the stellar RCA corporation through which he proceeded to mass produce his […]
On Disneyland
Walt Disney’s Shrunken Ancestors By John David Ebert The various optical tricks and spatial distortions which Walt Disney utilized in the making of his theme park often conceal ideas and philosophical views about the world. Take, for instance, the spatial distortions of Main Street, USA. “Main Street was a function of clever foreshortening,” Neal Gabler […]
On Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe, or Venus Redux  By John David Ebert It could be said that Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the non-reproducibility of an actor’s aura misses a certain point, since it was by means of the very technological process of filming and then projecting upon a gigantic screen the images of actors like James Dean, […]